The maximum concentration of results in incomplete round-robin tournaments

Abstract

The Herfindahl--Hirschman Index (HHI), a standard measure of market concentration, is widely used to quantify competitive balance in sports tournaments. To enable comparisons over time or across leagues, both its minimum and maximum should be known. The minimum is usually trivial. Our paper provides results on the maximum HHI in incomplete round-robin tournaments, where the set of matches is represented by a regular but not complete undirected graph. We prove that the lower bound of maximum HHI is reached when the tournament consists of independent round-robin groups, while the upper bound of maximum HHI is reached when the set of matches is represented by a bipartite graph. Maximising HHI is computationally difficult even for highly structured graph types corresponding to real-world tournaments, where the teams are partitioned into pots and play the same number of matches against opponents from every pot. The complexity of the problem does not depend on the scoring system or the number of opponents from a pot.